TAMPA, Fla. — Channel 11′s Alyssa Raymond spoke with a man who was in Pittsburgh when Hurricane Helene hit. But shortly after he got back to Florida where he lives now word about a much stronger hurricane started to spread.
“It was just like Helene,” said Michael O’Toole. “Then Helene passed and then Milton went from a storm out in the Gulf to a Category 5 Hurricane at like the drop of a hat.”
O’Toole just moved to Tampa from Pittsburgh about two months ago.
“It’s a completely different way of reacting to weather down here,” said O’Toole. “Within 24 hours of knowing how big the storm was gas stations’ lines were half mile to a mile long.”
O’Toole and his friends decided to evacuate to Boynton Beach. He shared a video he took 12 hours before Hurricane Milton made landfall on the other side of the state.
“You could see the wind,” said O’Toole. “The palm trees had their leaves blowing sideways. But beyond that the clouds moved quickly. The wind was fast. And the water was moving faster than normal but other than that it just felt like a normal storm down here like you wouldn’t have known it was a hurricane.”
Meanwhile, it looked quite different from the Ring doorbell outside of his house in Tampa.
“You could see trees were sideways,” said O’Toole. “Bushes were sideways and just sheets of water were falling out of the sky.”
Then their glimpse into Tampa went dark. They were one of the more than three million without power. Crews from all over including Southwestern PA rushed down to help. Red Cross volunteers were already stationed there from Hurricane Helene.
“We knew we’d be coming up on this era of continuous response,” said American Red Cross of Greater Pennsylvania Communications Director Nicole Roschella. “These back-to-back disasters where we have to get down there and help people at the same time.”
The Red Cross of Greater Pennsylvania has more than 50 volunteers down there right now helping the 83,000 people who spent the night in shelters.
“We’re not leaving the people who were affected by Hurricane Helene,” said Roschella. “We’re still there, and we will be there for weeks and months to come and at the same time helping the people affected by Milton.”
Many, including O’Toole, felt grateful it wasn’t worse.
“There’s no way to know,” said O’Toole. “We thought Tampa was going to be flattened and it seems like aside from flooding and a few fallen trees Tampa is generally okay.”
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